My day with Beer part 5

October 15, 2009

All good things must come to an end and here-in endith the beer fair postings…

Here are some Panel Questions from the Symposium:

Someone asked about working at Anchor Steam and we found out that it’s a very small company but that part-time work might be available. And they compensate with beer as well as money.

But if you want to work in the industry then you go to Davis and get a degree in brewing.

A few comments were made about sour beer being unsellable but there are now sour beers being sold by certain brewers. This is meet with revulsion from the panel. They say that well… you can sell sour beer but it’s not a very good idea.

So they used to drink beer with straws… do we know what the straws were made of? The Anchor Brewmaster knows that royalty used gold straws and there are some examples. The Professor they talked about reeds being used by most people. The big reason for straws was because of the unfiltered nature of beer. Using a straw meant you didn’t have to slurp through “the gunk and floating stuff”.

The history of beer focuses on the Middle East because there are more records to pull from there.

Were there different recipes for different classes? Did the wealthy drink vastly different beer from the poor? None of the experts thought so. There were different recipes but it wasn’t about class so much as what ingredients were available. No specific spices were written in the Sumerian text / recipes.

There is no such thing as a good year for beer. The golden rule is consistency. Blending of ingredients allows for a consistency of taste from one batch to the next. They work with International Bitterness Units and Scoville Heat Units to work on a blend to match the taste they are looking to match.

Society likes to have something to bring it together.

For Anchor’s 30 year Anniversary of their new building they are putting out a Humming Ale on draft in a few places in the next month.

There is a story in England about organizing workmen… to get them together to you sober them up and have a meeting or offer them free beer and have a meeting?